GICE220-D10 Course_ Discussion Thread: The Power of Story

  Discussion Thread: The Power of Story

The common wish for most people that I have noticed is to seek to involve their lives in a more diverse lifestyle and tends to make traveling the world a part of their lifelong goal. This was one of the primary reasons I enlisted in the U.S. Air Force was the opportunity for a diverse life with some travel. However, I wasn’t so lucky and remained stuck in the States for the entirety of my enlistment. Diversity and understanding is what makes me excited and interested in learning about cultural intelligence and intercultural communication.

    I just returned to the States last week from my first time out of the country. I had the wonderful experience of traveling to the Philippines for about a month. Differences in personality, the diversity in culture, and just the overall feedback of information gained from experiencing another’s way of life has me all too enraptured that it has always been natural for me to seek to better understand others and why people do the things they do ever since a young adolescent. This is why I have such a close relationship with classical literature. It is the very foundation for communication and interpretation. We are made of literature internally and use that to communicate outwardly. Literature has shaped the world as we see today.

My own southern-like and traditional culture has also motivated me to seek out understanding among other walks of life. I had long-lived a young life where, sadly, prejudice still finds a home in the hearts of the people from my state of residence. It had been so very off-putting as naturally I had always found my own culture a bit distasteful and yearned for something greater and, yes, something with more cultural intelligence. I would thus state that this is one of the driving motives to my power story. I still always try to seek to gain some understanding even with my own culture and demographic. As I believe, truly this has been more of a challenge ironically enough. There strangely lays a refreshing peace for not knowing what someone else is saying in another language I have come to realize during my return to the States from my trip to the Philippines.  

I am very thankful and proud to be a West Virginian, but no matter where you go in the world you still have the same type of people. This isn’t something so much about their culture. It is certainly not something that is about race, religion, or even cultural differences. It is much more. Rather, it is a something that our Creator God has bestowed to us in the likeliness of His image. This would be the divine inheritance He has given to us that allows us to be the beings we are. Our conscience mind and the soul grafted into the human being that gives us the ability to conduct ourselves in the likes of a godly nature and bear the love of Jesus. What I am trying to attempt to illustrate here is the heart and intellect of man. This is what peak communication and relationship with one another despite any and all differences stem from. It is these very fundamentals that God has ordained into our reality to use with the best of our ability to come together despite all imperfections and personal bias to seek Him out and use the love that Christ had shown on the cross for us to fellowship with each other and make (His way) our way back to Him.